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Fahrenheit 451 on Paper

November 3, 2011

Today, in the final day of a series of films scored by Bernard Herrmann, Film Forum is offering François Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic, “Fahrenheit 451” (I’ve got a capsule review of it in the magazine this week). The production of the film cost Truffaut great agony, long before he got to the set: his plan to make the film dates back to 1960—while he was still putting the finishing touches on his second feature, “Shoot the Piano Player.” He planned to shoot it in 1962; he thought of shooting it in New York, with Paul Newman in the lead role; then, in French, with Jean-Paul Belmondo, then with Charles Aznavour; then, in English, with Peter O’Toole, then with Terence Stamp. He ended up making it in England, in 1966, with Oskar Werner in the lead role, and he had a miserable time of it, as he documented amply in his lengthy journal of the shoot that was published in two parts in Cahiers du Cinéma, and which he started writing to cope with his loneliness while working in a country where he didn’t speak the language. (It was translated soon thereafter in Cahiers du Cinéma in English, which existed briefly in the mid-sixties, edited by Andrew Sarris.) I’m sorry to say that I’m flying blind here, I can’t find my copy of the magazine, but recall that the journal makes for sad and bitter reading; Truffaut had lots of trouble dealing with the complex, studio-bound shoot and with Werner himself.

Truffaut found an interesting way of blending futuristic gizmos with retro stylings, of suggesting ways in which the future was already at hand. Unfortunately, by the time he got to make the film, Jean-Luc Godard had made a more radical—and more radically critical—blend of the contemporary and the dystopian, with “Alphaville” (which he shot in early 1965); in a letter that summer, Truffaut wrote, “You mustn’t think that ‘Alphaville’ will do any harm whatsoever to ‘Fahrenheit,’ “ but it did—it made it seem obsolete by the time it came out. The movie’s lack of success and Truffaut’s own frustrations added to make it seem like an unfortunate aberration in his career, as well as a terrible mistake. From a practical perspective, it may be so (one of the things he turned down for “Fahrenheit” was “Bonnie and Clyde”); but from an artistic point of view, “Fahrenheit 451” is one of Truffaut’s wildest films, a coldly flamboyant outpouring of visual invention in the service of literary passion and artistic memory as well as a repudiation of a world of uniform convenience and comfortable conformity, in favor of the ramshackle cell of culturally devout outsiders, resistance fighters in the name of art.

The wildness of the film represented a sort of ideal, one that he recaptured only intermittently, albeit gloriously, in the films that followed (most fully, in such films as “A Gorgeous Girl Like Me,” “The Man Who Loved Women,” and “The Woman Next Door”); “Fahrenheit 451” marks a break with the low-budget, street-level cinema; it’s tinged with regret, with a retrospective wistfulness that would mark the rest of his films.

P.S. Starting tomorrow at Film Forum and setting in for a week-long run, the film he made next, “The Bride Wore Black,” about which, more soon.